24 January 1859 – 30 January 1859

An abundance of excellent skating, the freshet that covered the meadows being frozen. Many boys and girls are skating on Mantatuket Meadow and on Merrick’s. Looking from this shore, they appear de- cidedly elevated,— not by their skates merely. What is the cause? Do we take the ice to be air ? I see an abundance of caterpillars of various kinds on the ice of the meadows, many of those large, dark, hairy, with longitudinal light stripes, somewhat like the com- mon apple one. Many of them are frozen in yet, some for two thirds their length, yet all are alive. Yet it has been so cold since the rise that you can now cross the channel almost anywhere. I also see a great many of those little brown grasshoppers and one perfectly green one, some of them frozen in, but generally on the sur- face, showing no signs of life; yet when I brought them home to experiment on, I found them all alive and kicking in my pocket. There were also a small kind of reddish wasp, quite lively, on the ice, and other insects; those naked, or smooth, worms or caterpillars. This shows what insects have their winter quarters in the meadow-grass. This ice is a good field for an ento- mologist. I experimented on the large bubbles under the ice. Some, the oldest and nearest the surface, were white; others, the newest and against the present under sur- face, were of a bluish or slate color, more transparent. I found that the whiteness of the first was owing to the great quantity of little bubbles above and below the great one produced by the heat of this “ burning-glass,”’ while those of recent formation have not had time to accomplish this. When I cut through with my knife an inch or two to one of the latter kind, making a very slight opening, the confined air, pressed by the water, burst up with a considerable hissing sound, sometimes spurting a little water with it, and thus the bubble was contracted, almost annihilated; but frequently, when I cut into one of the old or white ones, there was no sound, the air did not rush out because there was no pressure, there being ice below as well as above it; but when I also pierced the lower ice it did rush out with a sound like the others. My object at first was to ascertain if both kinds of bubbles contained air. But that was plain enough, for when the water rushed in the bluish, or new, ones wholly beneath the ice wholly or nearly disappeared, while the white ones, giving place to water, were no longer white. It would seem, then, that a considerable pressure, such as the water exerts on an air-bubble under the ice, does not force it through the ice, certainly not for a considerable time. How, then, can the musquash draw air through the ice as is asserted ? He might, how- ever, come to breathe in such a bubble as this already existing. The larger spiders generally rest on the ice with all their legs spread, but on being touched they gather them up.

The river has gone down about eight inches, and the ice still adhering to the shore all about the meadows slants downward for some four or five feet till it meets the water, and it is there cracked, often Jetting the water up to overflow it, so that it is hard to get off and on in some places. (090 6, 04 coe, , au @ of ~ %,%° That channel ice of the 22d (q. v.), lifted up, looks thin, thus :— a aemtemamonenaneny tat. pata a a aR ea es @ Me The edges of the outside portions are more lifted up now, apparently by the weight of the water on them.

P. M. — Over Cyanean Meadow on ice. These are remarkably warm and pleasant days. The water is going down, and the ice is rotting. I see some insects — those glow-worm-like ones — sunk half an inch or more into the ice by absorbed heat and yet quite alive in these little holes, in which they alternately freeze and thaw. At Willow Bay I see for many rods black soil a quarter of an inch deep, covering and concealing the ice (for several rods). This, I find, was blown some time ago from a plowed field twenty or more rods dis- tant. This shows how much the sediment of the river may be increased by dust blown into it from the neigh- boring fields. Any ice begins immediately after it is formed to look dusty in the sun anywhere. This black soil is rapidly sinking to the bottom through the ice, by absorbing heat, and, water overflowing and freezing, it is left deep within thick ice. Or else, lying in wavelets on the ice, the surface becomes at last full of dark- bottomed holes alternating with clear ice. The ice, having fairly begun to decompose, is very handsomely marked, more or less internally as it ap- pears, with a sort of graphic character, or bird-tracks, very agreeable and varied. It appears to be the skele- ton of the ice revealed, the original crystals (such as we see shoot on very thin ice just beginning) revealed by the rotting. Thus the peculiar knotty grain or knurliness of the ice is shown, — white marks on dark. These white waving lines within it look sometimes just like some white, shaggy wolf-skin. The meadow which makes up between Hubbard’s mainland and his swamp wood is very handsomely marked, or marbled, with alternate white and dark ice. The upper surface appears to be of one color and con- sistency, like a hard enamel, but very interesting white figures are seen through it. What various kinds of ice there are! This which lately formed so suddenly on the flooded meadows, from beneath which the water has in a great measure run out, letting it down, while a warm sun has shone on it, is perhaps the most interesting of any. It might be called graphic ice. It is a very pleasant and warm day, and when I came down to the river and looked off to Merrick’s pasture, the osiers there shone as brightly as in spring, showing that their brightness depends on the sun and air rather than the season.

I see some of those little cells, perhaps, of a wasp or bee, made of clay or clayey mud. It suggests that these insects were the first potters. They look some- what like small stone jugs.

Melvin tells me that one with whom he deals below says that the best musquash skins come from Concord River, and it is because our musquash are so fat. M. says that they eat apples, and he has seen where they have eaten acorns, and Isaiah Green told him and convinced him that they ate his seed-corn in the hill. He weighed a very large one the other day, and it weighed five pounds. Thinks they would not commonly weigh more than three. When you have been deprived of your usual quantity of sleep for several nights, you sleep much more soundly for it, and wake up suddenly like a bullet that strikes a wall.

How peculiar the hooting of an owl! It is not shrill and sharp like the scream of a hawk, but full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of the wood. The surface of the snow, especially on hillsides, has a peculiarly combed or worn appearance where water has run in a thaw; 2. e., the whole surface shows regular furrows at a distance, as if it had been scraped with an immense comb.